My Step-by-Step Guide To Dominate Crypto In 2024

Don't, I repeat, don't invest in crypto without a plan shorted. If there was an easy way to do it. Now you're probably thinking, oh, my goodness, boring. Why? Don't need a plan. It's one of the most important things that I learned on my crypto journey and it's actually far easier to create than you might first think. I'm going to walk you through today how you can actually create your own strategy. Based on the strategy that I've now used for the last seven years. I'm going to go through that today.

Now, this is a framework that anyone can use, beginner, intermediate or advanced to help you navigate the pitfalls of crypto cycles so you don't make the mistakes again, like you probably have in previous cycles of not selling when you should have and not making as much money as you could have. So let's get into it. Number one is, what does your current crypto portfolio even look like? You've probably got stuff everywhere. Metamask, Binance, SwiftX, Coinspot, where is it all? Pull it all into a spreadsheet, Write down all the assets that you have, write down the amount you have, write down the percentage allocation of that portfolio and where it's stored. If you're a collective shift member, you can plug this into your dashboard and that's going to give you your pie graph, which is the next part of this. What you want to then do is understand what category each cryptocurrency is in. Once you've got this, you've got that bird's eye view of your crypto portfolio to understand what sectors your portfolio is allocated in, and you can start to make decisions off the back of that. A common misconception people have with their crypto portfolio is they don't understand that for a lot of the altcoins you have, they are potentially all similar are in the same sector as other coins in your portfolio. For example, you might have tokens that are built on Ethereum, or you might have NFTs that are built on Solana. So you actually have more exposure to certain sectors of crypto that you probably first thought. And that's an important piece to understand. Number two is what are you trying to actually get out of crypto? It's actually a common thing that probably you haven't thought about. And when I started thinking about what are my actual goals in crypto, everything else became clear. So for me, in the last cycle, my goal was to make money and sell into fiat currency so I could build and invest into my business collective shift. And it's exactly what I did in the next cycle. It's to buy my mum and dad a home. What is your goals? Write them down. Is it to pay off your mortgage? Is it to get your kids through university? Is to quit that job and retire and go to Bali? What are those goals that you want in your crypto? And that's going to help you dictate a lot of the other things we're about to talk about? Number three, what is your time horizon? Are you younger with a longer time horizon looking towards retirement or you older? You're already in retirement, so maybe your time horizon isn't as long, or maybe you have some impending financial goals that you need to achieve. If you understand your time horizon, that's going to help you understand it, what point you need to sell and what point you need to make the money that you're trying to achieve. Again, it's another thing that psychologically we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to make this, whatever that amount of money is in that period of time. But you may not even thought about how long you actually have to achieve those things. For me, I had when I first started out, these misconceptions of I need to make all this money in the next year, next two years, but that can be really unrealistic. It can put additional pressure on you to make that money and can actually do the reverse effect. I've seen so many people with these financial goals that they're trying to achieve in a bear market in crypto and they start doing trading, they start staking, they start doing all this, this crazy, crazy stuff that actually hurts their portfolio and pushes their goals back. So understand your time horizon, write that down. And we're going to go into number four, what is your risk appetite? Now, the fact you're already in crypto tells me your risk appetite is already high. But what is your risk appetite with inside crypto? If you've got your crypto in a self managed super fund or a retirement fund, having your risk appetite is probably going to be quite low. You're going to want to hold predominantly Bitcoin Ethereum, because that's your retirement fund. For younger people, maybe like myself, who's already made a lot of money in crypto and has a business, my risk appetite is a lot higher. I can manage and stomach that risk. And by understanding that, you're going to be able to navigate these cycles a lot easier, you're going to know really quickly if your risk appetite is lower than your current portfolio allocation because in a bear market you're going to feel nauseous, you're going to feel sick and you're going to want to sell. That's panic stations and I've been there. When you are overexposed to the cryptocurrency sector, it can be excruciatingly painful in a bear market and you start to question everything and that can be very problematic because you're going to make an emotional decision to understand your risk appetite and that's going to help us with the asset selection. What is your short and long term strategy? I look at crypto in two parts. I have my risk on portfolio and my risk off. It's my short and long term. So in my longer term portfolio I've got predominately Bitcoin and Ethereum. I'm looking to hold that for many tens of years down the track. Yes, I may take chunks off from time to time and readjust and maybe take some money to fee it, but I want to hold Bitcoin and Ethereum forever in my shorter term portfolio. I've recently added some altcoins back into that as we go into the next cycle. I think the shorter term plays in some of the altcoin sectors are going to have a really amazing run with the speculative value that a lot of the retail investors have. What is your short and long term strategy? Is there some shorter term things that are on the horizon for different altcoins that you like? Is there some things on the on the horizon that you see longer term are better for some of the positions you have? If you split that up, it's going to make it a lot easier to think about your portfolio because you can make more changes to your shorter term portfolio based on what's happening, but you've still got your meat and potatoes and your risk off portfolio going for the long term and you don't have to worry about this other stuff. Number six is have you reviewed the cryptocurrencies in your portfolio? Do you even know what they do anymore? I think there's so many people that got back in 2017, 2018, you've been holding those altcoins. You know what I'm talking about, Those altcoins that you're holding on for dear life, hoping they come back. Is it time to reevaluate? I did this back in 2018, 2019 when I was looking at my portfolio and I had all these altcoins absolutely everywhere and I wanted to just rotate back into Bitcoin, Ethereum. I wanted to consolidate. I wanted to preserve value and I took that capital loss on a lot of those altcoins. If you're in Australia, taking a capital loss is a tax strategy to offset future gains. Sold those altcoins down and rotated them in Bitcoin Ethereum. That set me up for the bear market, in which, coming out of the bull market of 2020, 21, I was able to rotate that BTC back into some of the old coins and run that narrative again. So some other things to review your cryptocurrencies in your portfolio is to look at how they've performed against Bitcoin and eth. I speak about this a lot. Don't just look at the value against USDC or aud, look at how it's actually performing against the wider cryptocurrency market, which you can do via comparing it to Bitcoin Ethereum. And so many people forget to do this. If you look at against Bitcoin, Bitcoin has actually outperformed 95% of the cryptocurrencies in the market. So look at your old coins, look at how comparing and then look at some of the competitors. Maybe you've bought into some layer ones. How are the other layer ones performing? What's their roadmap? What are the team? How's their community? Are they actually deploying the things they said they were going to deploy or have they gone in hiding? Again, it's going to be an emotional decision for you. You've bought something, someone's told you you should buy it. There's an emotional attachment. You hope it's going to come back, but that's where you can get yourself into trouble. So try and keep emotion out of it and try and keep it as factual as possible and make the decisions with the information you have on hand. Do you sell? Do you keep it? Do you keep a little bit and sell the rest? So you still got a foot in the game. There's some decisions you need to come up with now. The next one is where is your cryptocurrency being stored? One of the biggest problems we've seen in the last 24 months is holding crypto on centralized exchanges can be a big problem. We don't know what's happening behind the scenes. There could be fraud, it could be mismanagement of funds, we don't know. I've never kept cryptocurrency on a centralized exchange. They are great as a way to do transactions and buy your crypto, but they are not a bank, they are not a place where you can insure your crypto. And it's not like holding your money in an Australian bank. If it goes under, like Celsius, like FTX, like BlockFi, like so many of these exchanges, overnight, your money can disappear. So I highly recommend getting a cold wallet like a ledger or a Trezor. Set that up. If you need some help, you can go to the Collective Shift website under resources. We've got some strategies there, step by step guides on how to actually set that up. Move your cryptocurrency into that cold wallet. That means you have complete control. No one can take that off you. You have complete freedom in your portfolio. All right, so get it off a centralized exchange onto your cold wallet. Now, if you're unfamiliar with crypto storage, it can be quite concerning and it can be quite difficult to get these things set up. So many people have lost crypto through trying to self custody. In fact, over 4 million bitcoins are estimated to be lost out of the total 21 million. So there might only be 17 million Bitcoin actually in circulation, which is crazy or will be in circulation. So make sure you get your wallet set up, follow the due process, make sure the firmware is updated, make sure the software is updated. If you need professional help, please reach out. We can help. Go to our website, we've got some resources. And just do it really slowly, follow it step by step and you'll get it set up and you're going to be fine from then on. Number eight is what is your buy strategy? Anyone can buy crypto. You shoot from the hip, you hear something you want to buy and barrel it in. Usually driven by fomo, right? So a buyer strategy is really understanding what sectors you want to be exposed to and how much. So I used our Collective Shift dashboard to plug in the assets that I wanted to get to the sectors that I wanted to be exposed to. I love Bitcoin, I love Ethereum, I love Defi, and I love some of the layer two. So I pulled down my dashboard and I started to just, you know, adjust my, my assets and the amount I held to get the portfolio percentage allocation I wanted. And that was the buy strategy that I had then to go and execute my buyers. I understood where was the best place to make those transactions. Was I buying in cash? Was I buying with Bitcoin and Ethereum and then going to the right exchange? If you're buying in cash, going to an OTC desk trader, if you're trading over 15 or $20,000, can save you a lot on Fees and the spreads. If you're looking to do a transaction on altcoins, going to a decentralized exchange where there's liquidity can help you with slippage. And if you're just looking for some of the top 10, top 20, maybe just going to a centralized exchange could be a really great way to get fast way to get exposure to these altcoins. Just understand the fees and spreads is something that differs on different exchanges but can cost you a lot if you're not aware. Number nine is what is your sell strategy? Something that not many people talk about. Buying's easy, selling's the hard thing. When are you going to be selling the tokens and at what price and how are you going to sell? This was the biggest thing that allowed me to make life changing amounts of money in the last crypto bull market where I got in early into a lot of the Metaverse projects and had a sell strategy. I knew exactly what price I was going to sell, what token and how much of that token I was going to exit for. So many people think about it's black and white, I'm either in or out of the market, but I use a dollar cost averaging out strategy. So I have exactly at what price I'm going to sell 10%. If it goes higher, I sell 20%. If it goes high, I'm going to sell 30%. And having that documented on your strategy plan which you're creating today, will help you not be emotional and execute according to what you've written down. People always ask me, when is the bull market? When is the top going to happen? Will things adjust? Right, so I have my strategy, I have it foundational. This is where I think right now I'm looking at comparisons of different projects. I'm looking at where we were in previous cycles, but it does adjust, but it's not emotionally adjusted. As we go through a bull market, I understand where we are in the cycle, where the sentiment is and how far we have to go. And I will adjust if I need to. And I adjust that a long way up from where I was in the last cycle. So understand that it's not set in stone, but it gives you something to base yourself from. Last but not least is have you considered your tax and corporate structure of how you're investing? This got me good. When I first got in crypto, I made an absolute pile of money in the last cycle and I hadn't really. I knew the tax that I was going to be having to pay, but I was investing into my business I was building my business and I wanted all the money I could to, to build Collective Shift. Got a knock on the door from the ato. Theoretically I didn't get a knock on the door. I did my tax return and it was a huge taxable event. And I think for so many people you get caught out on this now, I was aware of it, I knew it was coming. But you can be much better prepared and I will be more prepared moving forward. Whenever I make those transactions from crypto to crypto, understand that that's a taxable event. How much profit did you make and put that money aside. Take that 30, take that 40% in cash so you can pay the tax plan down the line and not get that big bill shock. Then are you in the right structure? Are you investing under yourself? Can you invest in a trust where you can distribute profits to your family members? Have you considered the 50 capital gains incentive in the in Australia weekend? If you hold for more than 12 months, you, you can actually reduce your capital gains by over 50%. These are things you need to be thinking about because if you're talking big money, we're talking a lot, a lot of capital that you're going to save by thinking about these things. Now these are the most important things that you need to consider when investing into crypto. And the ten step strategy that I just walked you through, we actually have in a document which you can see in the description below, you can save that, fill it out, create that, save it, print it out, whatever you need to do and execute that in the bull market. And I guarantee you're going to be far better off by having that plan than going in without any plan at all. I hope that's been helpful. My name is Ben. I'm the founder of Collective Shift, Australia's leading crypto research company. If you like this video, please let me know in the comments below what you liked, what you think I missed, and how you're going to be targeting and trying to make money in the next cycle. Let me know in the comments below. Thanks and I'll see you next episode.